FILM REVIEW – HARRY POTTER
AND THE HALF-BLOOD.PRINCE (2009)
The best film in the boy wizard in peril series to date, and based on the penultimate of the books.
On the brink of his penultimate year at Hogwarts Wizarding & Witchcraft boarding school, Harry is more in danger from the Death Eaters cult surrounding Lord Voldermort than ever. The Death eaters are even attacking the Muggle World, as seem in their destruction of the Millennium Bridge at the film’s beginning, (the bridge bucking and swinging as terrified tourists run for their lives is reminiscent of the actual bending of the bridge when it first opened to the public).
Harry, out alone in London, (the film lacks any book-ending scenes with the Dursley family for once), is trying to chat up a waitress in a café, when he is whisked away by headmaster, Dumbledore, to visit a wizarding teacher, Professor Slughorn, played superbly by Jim Broadbent, hiding himself away from the Death eaters by pretending to be part of the furniture of the house he has borrowed.
Dumbledore talks Slughorn into returning to teach potions at Hogwarts, and Harry soon realizes that Dumbledore has an agenda in doing so beyond Harry’s own safety, as carries the memory-tampered mental key to a series of Horcruxes, - magical artefacts and objects which contain seven portions of Voldermort’s own soul. While even one such horcrux remains intact, Voldermort is effectively invincible.
The information gained, Harry & Dumbledore set off on a quest to track down one such horcrux, unaware that a deadly trap is being set for Dumbledore by his enemies back at Hogwarts.
Much of the film is a two-hander for Daniel Radcliffe & Michael Gambon as student & Headmaster, with a long lovely sub-plot about teenage romances being complicated by love potions. There are terrific performances from Rupert Grint’s Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as Hermione Grainger, & Jessie Cave is hilarious as Ron’s lovesick self-appointed girlfriend, Lavender Brown. Harry, focused on more serious matters, seems doomed to celibacy.
Another nicely worked out area is the fate of Draco Malfoy, the traditional Flashman style school bully of Hogwarts finding the transition from thug to would be assassin too hard to bear.
Other students & teachers,
and the rest of the familiar cast are reduced to mere cameos, with a very fleeting glimpse of Timothy
Spall’s Peter Pettigrew, and a startling attack on the Weasley home known as
the Burrow (a scene not used in the books). The central title plot of the
Half-Blood Prince’s identity is revealed almost in post-script as irrelevant to
the main activity – the darkest of the Potter books, setting the scene for the
epic finale when the twin films for The
Deathly hallows comes out soon.
LINKS
The film on The International Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417741/
The film on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Half-Blood_Prince_(film)
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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